A man gave me a parachute, I buried it.

He didn’t know about my fear of flying,

but perhaps he could tell by the look in my eyes

that I was falling;

had been falling since that fateful summer day

when you told me you weren’t strong enough

to hold up the both of us,

or that every time I hear the name we would have given him,

I feel that suddenly

the ground has been stripped away from underneath me.

A man gave me a parachute

and I buried it below the old oak tree in my front yard where we sat cross-legged in the grass

on that summer day with green leaves swaying back and forth above our heads and the scent

of wheat and corn blown in by the breeze that scattered your long auburn hair around your face,

hair the same color as your eyes were when you told me our son wasn’t strong enough to make it

full term. I covered that parachute unfolded with several shovels full of dirt along the roots

of that hundred year old tree hoping that somehow they would fuse together

in some glorious and unheard of chemical reaction to create something strong enough

to save me.

A man gave me a parachute,

but he didn’t know

I had already hit the ground where I buried it.

-Greg Gose